Dirty Life and Times: To Warren Zevon, 15 Years After He Passed

Just about everyone, no matter how cool they are, reaches the absolute nadir of their awkwardness in middle school. It’s a confusing, savage time marked by the onset of puberty, increased responsibilities far disproportionate to your new privileges, and your peers realizing how many exciting ways there are to be mean to people without physically hurting them.

With that in mind, understand the weight it carries when I tell you I was not cool even by middle school standards. I didn’t listen to popular music. I don’t mean I refused to, in some smug, iconoclastic hipster sense, understand. I mean it was not at all on my radar and I had no idea what to even look for, particularly in the early 2000s, when the only thing on the Internet was Flash animations of Osama bin Laden falling into a volcano that took 4 hours to load. The only music I was aware of was what played on the radio while we drove to Mass, which sounds like a Rodney Dangerfield joke about what a dweeb I was (as, I suppose, does a Rodney Dangerfield reference made by a millennial).

It was in this state of pop culture tabula rasa that my dad introduced me to A Quiet, Normal Life, Warren Zevon’s 1986 greatest-hits compilation. On the album cover, Zevon’s staring through purple-tinted wire-frame glasses with a raised eyebrow but an otherwise inscrutable expression. When my dad showed me that cover, he told me you could tell just by looking at Zevon that there’s “something off about him.” You really can.

The album in question contained Warren Zevon’s only big hit, “Werewolves of London,” but it also contained deeper cuts that are even more representative of his fucked-up sense of humor, his poet’s soul and his refusal to countenance the idea that you couldn’t write a bitching rock song about geopolitics. There’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” a ghost story about the vengeful corpse of a mercenary veteran of the Biafran Wars of the mid-60s that ends by rhyming “Patty Hearst” and “burst.”

Or “Excitable Boy,” a bit of pitch-black humor about a rapist/cannibal/murderer surrounded by people who excuse his behavior with the titular description, which may be deliberate absurdism but is recognizable in any news story about an offender who happens to also act or play football well.

Or perhaps his second most-recognizable song, “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” a banger in the form of a desperate plea from an American failson in trouble abroad, which is even more resonant. (The second line of the song is “How was I to know she was with the Russians too,” for God’s sake.)

Zevon’s stuff was nothing like anything I’d heard before, limited as that subset of music was. It was weird and offbeat and unapologetic about doing its own thing, even if that limited its appeal. In the doldrums of that Awkward Time, and a couple years away from my formal diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome, it felt like music that really connected with me the way, I suppose, music we love is supposed to. It made my personality and interests feel like features rather than bugs.

A few months before my diagnosis, Warren Zevon received one of his own. In 2002, he was diagnosed with plural mesothelioma and, in typical fashion, told an interviewer he wasn’t too worried as long as he lived to see the next James Bond movie. (He did.) Rather than undergoing a treatment regimen, Zevon set about recording his last album, The Wind, which features Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, the latter in a duet with Zevon on its best track, “Disorder in the House.” This song features the line “It’s the home of the brave/And the land of the free/Where the less you know, the better off you’ll be,” which is a pretty great line even today but blew my fucking mind at 13 years old.

And then, just a few days after I started high school, he was gone. Warren Zevon died 15 years ago today at the age of 56. Most people are ill-equipped to process the death of someone they know when they’re 14, let alone someone they only know through their art, so Zevon’s death didn’t hit me for a while, especially since, outside of that amazing album, I discovered a lot of his music after his death. As high school wore on, though, the late, great Warren Zevon became even more important to me. The CW original programming notwithstanding, all the awkwardness of middle school is still there in high school, but with the expansion pack of a constant Greek chorus telling you how important it is that you get laid and secure early admission to an Ivy League college by Christmas freshman year or you’ll be guillotined. I initially thought my diagnosis would help simplify things, and it did, to the extent that I was able to tell myself “Oh, so that’s why I fucked up that very basic social interaction.” But Warren Zevon’s music was still there, and it still kept me from feeling alone. Even more so than before, in fact, because as I matured (relatively speaking), I understood the themes and emotions his music conveyed even better. That’s the thing about the art we love; even when they stop making more of it, the way we love it can evolve with us.

It’s my nature to fixate on anniversaries and, in fact, my last post also concerned the anniversary of a death. But perhaps the reason I’ve been thinking so much about Warren Zevon leading up to this particular anniversary is how, just like Caroline, he’s continued speaking to me the entire time he’s been gone. Last year, for my 28th birthday, my dad gave me a particularly special gift: an art book from Zevon’s personal collection that he’d bought from Crystal, Zevon’s ex-wife. But the most meaningful part was yet to come: he also emailed Crystal an article I wrote in high school shortly after Zevon’s death about what his music had meant to me and she got in touch to tell me how much it had moved her. I thanked her, but I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell her Warren Zevon had understood me far more than I’d understood him, even though we’d never met, that his music had helped me survive to adulthood, perhaps not in the literal sense but in the sense of never losing sight of the idea that there was a place in the world for people who thought like me. I was too nervous to write any of that, of course, but today,15 years after such a bright light went out, I’ve finally given it my best shot.